Report: Nuclear plants 'naked' to terror threat

America's nuclear power plants and research labs remain vulnerable to terrorist attacks from the sea, sky and control room, despite tighter security imposed since 9/11, says a scholarly study prepared for the Pentagon and released Thursday.

None of the 104 commercial nuclear reactors – including the two sitting idle at San Onofre – is required to defend against attacks from fuel-laden airliners; or to protect against sea-born attacks on cooling systems, which could cut off water supplies to reactor cores and cause catastrophic meltdown; or to defend against inside saboteurs and teams of terrorists armed with high-powered sniper rifles and/or rocket-propelled grenades, which are easily accessible on the market, said Alan J. Kuperman, coordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs, and co-author of the report.

"We're trying not to unduly alarm, but to duly alarm," Kuperman said.

All reactors and labs should be protected against the maximum credible threat, not just against the much-lower "design basis threat," Kuperman said.

"These nuclear reactors are naked. They are naked against a maximum credible terrorist attack," he said.

Government regulators and nuclear industry insiders vehemently disagreed, saying that more than $2 billion has been spent beefing up reactor safety since 9/11. They were safe before, and they are even safer now, officials said.

More than 8 million people live within 50 miles of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. More than 17 million live within 50 miles of the Indian Point reactors in New York. Nationwide, 116 million people are "nuclear neighbors," according to the U.S. Census Bureau – living beside reactors and thousandsof tons of nuclear waste stored on site.

BEYOND MELTDOWN

While San Onofre is no longer at risk for core meltdowns – its reactors have been idle for some 18 months, and all fuel has been moved into spent fuel pools to cool – it still has millions of pounds of highly radioactive nuclear waste on site. The overwheming majority of that waste is stored in those pools, which are not protected by thick containment domes as reactors are.

"The spent fuel pools are a very significant vulnerability, as we saw in Fukushima in Japan," Kuperman said. "The concern is that terrorists could do intentionally to a spent fuel pool what happened to Fukushima's pools by an accident of nature: You drain the water out. The fuel heats up, and melts, and you get a criticality event and the release of very significant amounts of radiation."

Such an attack would be difficult, but possible, according to a review by the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. It could cause thousands of deaths from cancer and economic damages in the hundreds of billions of dollars, the NAS concluded.

Terrorists have indeed eyed nuclear power plants as potential targets, the report said. Al Qaeda considered attacks on a nuclear power reactor as part of its original 9/11 plan, and there have been reported threats or attempts to blow up or penetrate nuclear reactors in Argentina, Russia, Lithuania, Western Europe, South Africa and South Korea.

Before 9/11, nuclear plants were required to be able to fend off attacks by one team of three individuals, aided by a passive insider who provided information but did not participate. Details of 9/11 changes are classified, but one source reported that the assumed number of attackers was only increased to "less than double the old figure and a fraction of the size of the 9/11 group" of 19 hijackers; another source said it was "five or six well-armed terrorists, possibly working in conjunction with an insider or two."

This reflects an official assumption that only one terrorist cell would attack a plant at a time, which doesn't come close to present reality, the report said.

Of course, the nuclear industry cannot afford to defend plants against massive attacks alone, Kuperman said. That's where the federal government must pick up the slack.

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